a delicious blueberry dish

so, i've been getting a bunch of blueberries in my farmshare. love them, but what do i do with them all? and of course, i had an actual reason to cook them! because a coworker (who is a fantastic cook herself) is in the process of remodeling her new (new to her, quite old to the world) farmhouse, and got the renovations to a point where she could have a house party. and so i needed to bring something! and needed to find a good blueberry recipe! initially, i was thinking of just doing a blueberry bread, and just adapting my bananabread recipe (which, come to think of it, i might do this week since i bought more blueberries at the market as they were on sale!)

it just so happened that this past week i came across a lovely food blog, smitten kitchen, with all kinds of lovely recipes. perhaps some day my blog will be a bit more like that, when i am creating my own recipes more than just using other recipes posted online or in books. in any event, i saw this blueberry crumb bar recipe, and they looked so incredibly delicious, i had to make them!


i was rather surprised at the way the bars are made, with the blueberries all in one layer. i would have expected it to be too juicy that way, but perhaps the cornstarch made up for that and helped to bake it into a thicker jammy layer.


i did make one slight alteration to the recipe. and that was that i waited to add the egg to the dough until after i had incorporated the butter. yes yes i know that isnt really an alteration, i am sure that is how miss smittenkitchen did it as well, because that is generally how all flaky butter-based doughs are made (dry ingredients --> butter --> wet ingredients). i think my butter might not have been cold enough, because it is so freakin hot in my apartment right now, so that probably also contributed to my dough being just a bit more wet and together. it really came together, which was nice for the bottom layer of the dough, but a bit too-together for the top - i think that it should have been more crumbly.



on the whole, they were very delicious, and nice and cakey. the lemon gave it a very nice touch, unsurprisingly, considering how well blueberries and lemons go together. and while they went pretty quick since i brought them to a party, and thus didnt have a chance to test the storing-in-the-fridge thing, i think that would make them even better. i wonder if they might be better with a more crumbly top in general though. i think that using the same topping as the bottom layer detracts a bit. i am remembering back to the blueberry muffins my mother used to make, with a sugary crumbly topping. am thinking i might try a bread more similar to that this weekend, with a sugary crumbly topping. hmmmm...

boring food

I fear i have been cooking a lot of boring food lately. sort of a "same old same old." i think that is one of the downers about the farmshare. while i am loving getting a box of random vegetables each week, and supporting local agriculture...it can be quite frustrating if I get an assortment i am not particularly interested in, OR if i get a really exciting assortment during a week that is particularly busy for me when i wont have much time to cook, so things might spoil before i have the time to do something interesting with them. like in the picture above. i was so super excited to get cabbage. maybe i could have done a slaw, OR what i wanted to do was cook it with beef and other vegetables and make little cabbage wraps - it sounded very exciting. unfortunately, i didnt have time, so boring sauteed cabbage it was. and the kale that i got! i love kale, always looking for new things to do with it. but it was starting to wilt because time gets away from me, and the potatoes were going to get bad too, so i boiled those and roasted some chickpeas to be something interesting. and then the beets, which i also love - the beet greens were still attached, and i wanted to do something exciting like risotto or pasta or something, but no time so i roasted and did a salad with feta. all of this quite tasty, but boring!!


another week, another pile of vegetables that i have no clue what to do with and need to cook mostly in one night because its the only time i have free. first up: tons of cherry tomatoes. actually, technically, i think they are grape tomatoes. yum, but i dont eat enough salads at home, so what am i to do with them? perhaps in a cold pasta salad? yum. initially, i was going to put other vegetables in the salad as well - like cucumber and maybe zucchini...but alas, they went bad too quickly. it kills me that i am wasting vegetables some weeks. also needed to use up some swiss chard (i have found that if i smother it in butter, it tastes much better) and onion, and turnips! so what did i do with the turnips? boiled, then fried up like french fries! delicious! but probably incredibly unhealthy and not worth all that oil. i need to figure out a way to get them a crisp up a bit better. man, i really wish i had a deep-fryer sometimes. though at the same time i KNOW what a bad idea that would be.

i feel like a grown up

so its been a rough few weeks at work. deadline after deadline, working late, and just a generally boring subject matter to my project work, so its been a little blah lately. so when amy and i realized it had been a while since we had really hung out, and she has also had quite the busy time at work lately, we decided that we were getting together on thursday night and having a little girls night, and watching some GLEE and drinking some wine. i bought some chicken wednesday night, and found a recipe online, and got the chicken marinating. that way, thursday night all i would have to do is put the chicken in the oven, rice in the rice maker, and throw some tsatsiki together, and voila! dinner! THIS must be how real adults do it!


the flaw, in this plan, however, is that 1. i had to work late thursday night. like, too late to get together with Amy. bah. the other flaw in the plan is that even though tuesday afternoon, when i played with my netflix queue and put GLEE first because it was available "now" ... by wednesday morning, when they were actually shipping my dvds, GLEE went to "long wait" and i got the next movies on my queue instead. um, so unfair!! so maybe we do this friday night, right? that will work perfectly, right? except it was alexandra's birthday, and we all wanted to go out drinking after such a long week, and so we headed to kerry's apartment to meet elin, and do some drinking before going out. so by the time i got to cook the chicken, it was saturday evening, but miraculously it was still good! and delicious roasted over some onions, with rice and tsatsiki.


tonight, i went with an old classic: angel hair pasta, with asparagus, secret sauce, and parmesan cheese. very much lacking, however, because i didnt have time to get proscuitto. still tasty, and we can pretend it is healthy.

it feels like summer now

so a week ago, the weather was BEAUTIFUL, and the lovely three-day memorial weekend was about to begin, and so i stopped off at whole foods on my way home from work to start the weekend on a good note. and i filled my cart up with delicious delicious fruits. and then i saw corn, and it looked so so good and was 3 ears for $1. 3 ears. $1. absurd, right? so i bought some. and then i went over to the meat counter, because i wanted to try this lamb recipe i found a few weeks ago. but they didnt have the cut i wanted, and so instead....i decided to get some pork, to make pulled pork! again, a first for me. but it was JUST PERFECT for throwing in the slow cooker saturday morning before going out for the day. throw that together with my cucumber and tomatoes from the farm share, and we have a perfect summer meal!

the corn...was probably the best corn i have had in a long time. didnt need butter, didnt need salt, it was just fresh goodness. i think it is going to be a corn summer for me, it is so simple. reminds me of my first weekend in sydney, 3 years ago (man that was so long ago!) when we went down to bondi beach, and there was a little festival going on, and they were selling corn on the cob on a stick. amazing. and did you know that blue ribbon sells bbq sauce? it does! which is quite tasty when you make pulled pork with it. not as good as stamey's though. sometimes i want to go visit my uncle and grandma down south, JUST so i can get some stamey's. yum! i topped this meal off with some white sangria - apple and watermelon and white cran peach and white wine and yum yum yum.

i can make cheese now. is there anything i cant do? ((yes))

A few weeks ago, i managed to get in off the waitlist for a goat cheese making class at the Natick Community Organic Farm. was so excited that someone dropped out of the class so that i could get a spot!! at the class, i got a little starter kit, so i decided to try to make my own goat cheese that very weekend! the family was in town for cathy's graduation, so i thought it would be a good little take-home gift. i picked up some goats milk at whole foods on my way home, and got things going. this recipe is so simple, i will probably make this somewhat often. you start with a gallon of milk, and heat it to 86 degrees. then add the starter. turn off the heat. take a picture. put the lid on. let sit. i started it around 11pm, maybe midnight. checked on it before leaving for work, and it looked pretty good, but i wanted to let it sit longer. i ended up getting home around 4:30 (it was a friday) and was able to begin step 2:


look at that amazing separation of the curds from the whey! so freakin awesome. so i scooped out all of the curds, and discarded the whey. apparently, you can drink the whey, or make whey-bread, or whatever you want, because it is all protein, no fat, and good for you. so...if you want some whey, i will save it the next time i make goat cheese, if you ask nicely.


so i ladled all of those lovely curds into cheese cloth. except this is not cheese cloth. it is butter muslin, which is much more fine, and allows you to make soft cheeses like chevre, soft goat cheese, fresh white cheese, etc. and so the cheese curds started chillin in the butter muslin in a collander...


you can let the cheese drain for a variable amount of time. i decided to do it for the rest of the day, and actually overnight as well, so that the cheese would be a really thick consistency. maybe i will try it really soft sometime, but i really prefer it to be thicker, and this actually came out an amazing consistency


the next morning, it was ready to be rolled into chevre logs, and spread on to pieces of bread, with a little drizzle of balsalmic vinegar. oh my god so good! yum yum yum. after that success, i decided to buy some kits so that i could make it again. and also so that i can make mozzerella and ricotta! SO excited to try making mozzerella soon!

so i threw a dessert party

so, months ago at this point, on my birthday, we were out at the peoples republik, enjoying some tasty cocktails, and talking about how much we like dessert. and making dessert. and wouldnt it be fun if we had a party where everyone made some dessert and brought some and enjoyed it all? so we pulled out our blackberries and looked for the right weekend to do it. settled on one, and i put it in my calendar, and then a few weeks later i sent out invites and we had ourselves a dessert party! i, of course, had to bake a whole bunch of stuff in case no one brought anything. and also because i wanted to use up some ingredients i had lying around. so the first thing i made is this apple molasses cake that sarah hopp gave me the recipe to. spicy and delicious, though it drives me crazy when you cant get a cake out of its pan completely. i think maybe next time i will use parchment paper so that the top is perfect, just have to hope that the caramel doesnt run under it.


after the cake was squared away, i opened up my martha stewart cookie cookbook, and looked for something tasty. and i wanted something chocolate. and so...chocolate peanut butter brownies! this picture is horribly out of focus, but its the only one i took of them. and they were deliciousssssssssss. i dont think you can go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter. i am thinking of making them again tonight, actually.


and then i had to pick a 3rd thing out of the martha stewart cookie cookbook. and i had some figs leftover from when i made the fig sauce for the duck breast from months earlier. so here comes the fig pinwheel cookies. which were obnoxious as hell to make. i dont know if it was because the weather was warm and so the dough was melting too quickly, or what, but even with chilling, it was impossible to work with. so i probably wont make these too often. but they were fairly decent.

party was a total success. allison brought red velvet cupcakes. erin did these amazing brownie-cookie-dough things. malima made cookies. jay made a carrot cake - complete with little orange/green carrots decorating the top. there may have been other things, but that is everything i can remember.

fiddle-le-dee fiddle-le-doo fiddleheads!

Oh fiddleheads. I had absolutely NO idea what these were when they arrived in my CSA share. because they look quite weird. and man they are a bitch to clean. but Jen, from work, who recently also joined the farmshare, shared her recommendation for how to cook them with me, and i did a little bit of googling, and made this delicious pasta dish with sauteed fiddleheads and tomatoes. yum. fiddleheads are one of my new favorite vegetables. one of many different vegetables i have happily been introduced to since joining my farmshare. beets, celeriac, parsnips, fiddleheads...the delicious list goes on.


the second time i got them, i also got english peas. which you have to shell yourself. which was actually remarkably fun. tedious, sure, but fun. i like peas. did a similar thing with the fiddleheads (blanche, saute with tomatoes, repeat) and it was...boring. i think i overcooked them, the peas were undercooked, i hate stew-like tomatoes, and i put too much oil in. blah. plus, i cant quite figure out what type of starch/grain this dish would go well with. its not right with pasta. potatoes maybe, but i think they would be too thick. couscous too thin. rice maybe but it might be too much. bah. conundrum. now that i think about it more, potatoes might be the best bet. would probably be tasty with them mashed, and might even go nicely with roasted potatoes. next time?


the most recent time, i yet again blanched and then sauteed. this time i chopped up an onion and sauteed that first, then added the fiddleheads and some chicken broth and white wine, and threw chicken that i had fried in, and let it cook up nicely for maybe 20 minutes. yum. i felt so accomplished after, like i had cooked a real meal like a real person. i also made some carrots on the side. and quite possibly burned them because i was doing my dishes as they cooked. oops. but still a real meal! with a main course and a side and everything! i feel so grown up....

i dont even REMEMBER cooking some of this stuff

well i have had QUITE the hiatus from actually writing about the food i have been cooking. have still been cooking, and taking pictures of food, but all of those pictures have remained on my camera. because i am lame, and lazy, and have been overworked. so, let me catch up on the posts, and maybe get on a regular schedule.


i think i blocked this out of my memory. because it was...not that great. i really dont know why i made this, i think i just needed to use up some supplies. i had some good bread that was going to go bad, and swiss chard that i didnt know what to do with, and so i made this egg dish, the name of which i am completely forgetting right now (strata maybe?). and i put blue cheese and kalamata olives in it. and it was weird. it was tasty, mostly, but weird. i dont think i'll be making it again. but that might be because i hate swiss chard.


i was so proud of this meal, alothough it looks so ugly on the plate. i bought some lamb, and made a spice rub, and then broiled it. and it was delicious. my first time making lamb steaks. actually might have been my first time making lamb at home. and of course, as i always do with lamb (so often, right) i made a little tsatsiki sauce. yum. but i think the best part of the meal was the beet salad. my CSA finally gave me bunched beets! which means i finally had beet greens! and i found this delicious little salad recipe - roast the beets, and saute the beet greens, and then do a dijon vinaigrette...holy crap it is delicious!! i have made it a few times since then. delicious.


this was my brightly colored vegetables dinner. used up some of my carrots from the CSA, some potatoes, green beans with radishes, and boring chicken. for the potatoes, i attempted to make french fries without frying them. if i am remembering correctly, i cut them up, boiled them, and then baked them in a little bit of oil. they were....boring. just boring. i think next time, i will sacrifice the calories and fry them up. too much effort for boring fries! i also learned that...i hate radishes. like, really hate them. what the hell do you do with radishes? i mean, they are not tasty at all. even with green beans and a dijon vinaigrette. blech. glad i only got them for 2 weeks in the CSA, hope that they dont come back.


oh yum. i needed to use up some of my vegetables from my CSA, and so i chopped up some eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes, and roasted them up into deliciousness. threw it on top of some penne pasta, which i made a simple cream+goat cheese sauce for. it was...boring. i need to get better at making random sauces. the vegetables were delicious, but the sauce was really lacking something. and i had so much of this leftover! will i never learn?